NBC to Air Bryan Fuller's Mockingbird Lane Pilot as Standalone Halloween Special

Mockingbird Lane, the pilot which was to be the premiere of NBC’s rebooted Munsters series, instead will air as a Halloween special on Friday, Oct. 26 at 8/7 before Grimm, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Rumors about the potential series’ demise have been around for weeks; as recently as Wednesday, writer/producer Bryan Fuller took to Twitter to say the project still had a pulse.

But THR reports that Fuller and director Bryan Singer had different visions for the $10 million pilot, and in the end, the network didn’t love the finished product. Complicating matters, Fuller is now committed to stewarding NBC’s midseason drama Hannibal, as well.

However, according to an insider, if the special does well in the ratings NBC may go ahead and order it to series.

NBC has billed Mockingbird Lane as “a visually spectacular one-hour drama” based on the 1960s sitcom. It stars Jerry O’Connell as Herman Munster, Portia de Rossi as his wife Lily and Eddie Izzard as Grandpa.

Especially when, by their very description of the project, it seems clear that the people making the “reboot” don’t understand the appeal of the original show. The Munsters was by definition silly, cheesy, campy…..call it what you will, but it wasn’t a drama of any kind. When you make it a drama, you throw away its essence. And it was fully aware of its cheesiness–which was the main source of laughs.

Um… The reboot of BSG was exactly this, and arguably the updated series was one of the best dramas on TV when it aired (and still now, tbh). Just because one version of the story is campy and OTT doesn’t mean there can’t be another version with more dramatic qualities.

ONLY if NBC advertises it so people know it’s on. If NBC is trying to simply burn the show with no ads, then it’s going to fail. We have less than 3 weeks until Halloween and they haven’t even scheduled the date yet, so it’s not looking too good for this to go as a series. Hopefully I’m wrong.

I was looking forward to this tv series! If Bryan Singer and Bryan Fuller are in disagreement with the direction of this show, then get rid of Bryan Singer! He stinks! Look at what he did to the X-Men! Fuller is great and creative, NBC needs to ditch Singer and his lack of vision and creativity.

I really like the munsters original show, but im curious to see if this adaptation could work. I would definately watch it, even if its nothing like the origanal show. Besides I just dont think you could do another sitcom style munsters. No one can live up to Gwynne, DeCarlo, and Lewis.